A long journey in Silicon Valley

Daily Archives: January 12, 2011

UPDATE: I thought about this a little more this morning… in the first dialog box they say they won’t contact any of my google contacts without my permission but in the second dialog box (captured below) the implication is that I am giving them permission to do so. If my interpretation is correct then the UI goes from simply being poorly designed to purposefully misleading.

I finally got tagged in enough photos on Shoppybag to give it a try… here’s the problem, their user experience leaves so many unanswered questions that I simply gave up.

The signup process is pretty straightforward until the 2nd step and it is an entirely self inflicted wound. I fought back my initial hesitance about connecting my Google account contacts to the service but this 2nd step is so poorly presented that I abandoned the process. Nowhere on the UI is there any explanation of what they mean by “connect with friends” and this comes despite a note on the first dialog box that they would not contact anyone without my permission. So if they are not going to contact anyone what is meant by “connect with friends”.

They have clearly mined my Google contacts list and I gave them permission to do that but I simply don’t know what they are going to do when I click “connect” therefore I won’t do it. This is a great example of how poor UI decisions drive new user abandonment in applications that depend on access to a social graph. It’s a leap of faith to give anyone access to my contacts, it is essential that at every step in the process the UI reinforces my confidence that I won’t regret doing so.